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From: andrew fabbro <afabbro@brokenarrow.us.itd.umich.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Just Installed FreeBSD: Problems, Suggestions
Date: 3 Jun 1997 02:28:11 GMT
Organization: University of Michigan ITD News Server
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Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:42140
I installed FreeBSD 2.2.1 from the Walnut Creek CDROM this weekend
on my aging 486 (66Mhz, 16MB RAM, 1.2GB hard drive). It went very
well, almost painlessly. My hat's off to the FreeBSD team...
...but I did have a few problems, reactions, and suggestions I thought
I'd post here. Some of these are doubtless due to my ignorance,
and most are nit-picking. Please don't take this as criticism of
the FreeBSD team's fine work!
(*) I had some problems with the pkg_* system:
(*) I saw this message numerous times: "Warning: Can't
open dependency file '/var/db/pkg/blah/+REQUIRED_BY'!
Dependency registration is incomplete." The packages I
checked appear to be added and work fine, so...? Also, if
you give pkg_add(1) more than one argument and the above
message is generated, it doesn't tell you which package
generated the warning.
(*) The dependencies database also seems to be frozen at
one snapshot of versions-- I got the above warning a lot
for tk-4.1, even though I'd installed tk-4.2.
(*) I also got some warnings about tar not being able to
create symlinks (I think octave generated this error).
(*) pkg_add(1) seems to read the entire package tarball before
checking to see if it's already installed. Running pkg_add
for linux_devel when it was already installed resulted in a
long wait and a lot of disk activity on /var/tmp before seeing
"linux_devel already recorded as installed", while, say, uulib
only takes a few seconds. Wouldn't it be better to check to see
if the package is installed before doing all the untarring, etc.?
(*) I had lots of problems with /stand/sysinstall locking up while adding
packages. It stopped responding many times-- I was not able to determine
why (I realize this feedback is next to useless, but it seemed serious).
(*) Either pkg_add or sysinstall does not die gracefully when a partition
is full ;)
(*) I think my CD is missing packages. I cannot find jdk, for example.
pkg_add whined about this several times ("Can't open dependency file").
(*) /usr/bin/ee as the default editor?????
(*) The default partitions can be inadequate if you install a lot of
packages. Perhaps I just went starky and installed too many packages,
but I ran out of room on / . I think even with fewer packages, I might
have been left without enough /tmp space. (I think it was linux_devel's
files on /compat that broke the camel's back).
(*) BTW, would it save any memory to trim the number of pseudo-terminals
down? How many are needed for a single-user machine that does PPP?
(*) I know it would make them huge, but it would be nice to have the
source of the packages, or at least pointers (e.g., URLs) to sources.
(*) When I added more virtual terminals, 'kill -HUP 1' did not activate
them, despite what the FAQ said. Unfortunately, neither did rebooting...I
edited /etc/ttys, MAKEDEV'd, rebooted...what am I missing?
greenbuddha# grep ttyv /etc/ttys
ttyv0 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 on secure
ttyv1 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 on secure
ttyv2 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 on secure
ttyv3 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 off secure
ttyv4 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 off secure
ttyv5 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 off secure
ttyv6 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 off secure
ttyv7 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 off secure
greenbuddha# ls -C /dev/ttyv*
/dev/ttyv0 /dev/ttyv2 /dev/ttyv4 /dev/ttyv6
/dev/ttyv1 /dev/ttyv3 /dev/ttyv5 /dev/ttyv7
greenbuddha# kill -HUP 1
greenbuddha#
...and still no vt's beyond the first 3.
Thanks in advance for any/all help!
--
Andrew Fabbro [afabbro@umich.edu] www-personal.umich.edu/~afabbro/